Libby's Leaves

My Aunt Libby is a pretty wonderful gal.  Everyone needs someone who believes in family.  Aunt Libby is such a person.

For reasons unclear to me, she also believes in me.

So, one day I dreamed her up a quilt.

The rest of the story is this...

A few months earlier, while in my LQS, A Nimble Thimble, I noticed a bolt of linen fabric.  When I saw it, I knew that, someday, I'd use it for something.  I just didn't know what.

It's like this... I'm always seeing things that I like, but I usually don't know what to do with them.  So, I either file it in my head if it's a powerful thing, or, I write them in my notebook (see Falling Mountain for a description of my notebook) if it's a lesser vision.

Maybe you know what I mean, maybe not.

Aunt Libby

The powerful things are things that I just can't get out of my head.  The linen fabric was like that.  Every time I went into the LQS, I specifically looked for that bolt.  I can't explain why, but when I saw that bolt of fabric, it made me happy.

The lesser visions are just passing fancies, or fads, if you will.  I'm likely to forget those things, so I'm more likely to write them down.

The whole process might be compared to a situation like this... Let's say that one day you decide to make a rock house.  Then you decide to make the house out of rocks that you collect.  Naturally, you would always be on the look out for rocks.  Well, I'm always on the look out because I've decided to design quilts.  My ideas are my foundations, my rocks.

So, one fine day I was sitting at my mom's house looking out the window.  It turns out that my Aunt Libby and Uncle Billy live next to my mom on about 60 acres of woodland way out in the country.  This is one of those times when an almost completed design idea popped into my head.  It's rare, but it happens.

 

  Aunt Libby and Uncle Billy's Slice of Heaven

 

"Chance favors the prepared mind."

Louis Pasteur

It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been playing with ideas and if I wasn't always thinking about what would work as a design in a quilt.  I didn't explain in my last post, but this is what the saying "chance favors the prepared mind" means.

Of course, Lou was talking about how a scientist goes about his business, but the idea applies to almost anything.  I doubt that Louie knew much about making quilts. 

 

 The Farm

Always be thinking about what you might make.  About what you like.  About what shapes and colors appeal to you.  About what is meaningful to you and to those around you.  About what kind of mood you want people to feel when they see your quilt.  Moods like: comfort, excitement, nostalgia, pride...

See?  Your mind is prepared to recognize something as valuable when you see it or think it.  When you begin to think like this, you're world will open up to you and you're creativity will explode.

I hope you're starting to see some of the growth that I've experienced over the past year and a half.  I'm still experimenting with techniques, I'm still reading about different styles, ideas, and concepts, and I'm still picturing things in my head that need to be expressed.  This is the essence of design.

My thought that fine day was this... "What if I got some of the linen fabric that I like, ask Libby to choose some of her favorite leaves from her property, trace them, then sew them on to that linen.

Voila!  A quilt is born (in my head).

Almost the whole thing came to me in that moment.  I knew I had a winner.  The final thought that I had was to make the front and back of the quilt the same.  That was a new idea to me, and one that I thought would give it some interest, if only for the novelty of it.

Incidentally, I didn't know that what I was thinking was called a whole-cloth design.  I only learned that later.

Now that I had the essentials of the design in my head, I called Aunt Libby.  I posed a challenge to her which she accepted.  Being playful, making it fun, is also part of the deal with making quilts.  At least I think it is, and, this is my post, so there.

My challenge to her involved only two things:

First, she was to ask no questions.

Second, she was to collect 25-30 of her favorite leaves from her property and give them to me.

Of course, the first was by far the more difficult of the two.  Women are as curious as kittens.

But, I have to hand it to her.  She was game and she got to collecting.  The night she gave them to me, we were at my mom's place and I had yet another brilliant idea.  I gave her some paper and a pencil and said that she needed to trace the leaves.  My mom (another curious kitten) was very interested in the goings on, and, before you could say "humbug," she, too, was tracing.

There is a moral to this story: Read Tom Sawyer; you'll not be sorry.  Me and Tom and Mark: birds of a feather.  I even named my daughter Becky.  It was as close as I could get.  I couldn't find a gal named Becky silly enough to marry me.

But, as luck would have it, she fell in love with a guy named Tom.  It's the circle of life, or something like that

If none of what I just said made sense to you, shame on you.  You're culturally illiterate.  Go read a book.  No, go read lots of books.  Hmmmmpf.  If this is you, you probably didn't know who Louis Pasteur was, either.  Shameful.

Now, where was I?  We were designing a quilt, weren't we?

The linen is a light brown, so I thought that fall colors would be nice for the leaves, and I thought that an orange stripe in the border would frame it nicely along with a dark brown binding.

Really, it was just a matter of putting the elements together.  All of these ideas were things that I had practiced before.

I had a thought last night about quilt building that I thought I'd share.  I was thinking about the two elements of quilt building: design and technique.  These are very different things, but both are essential.  Someone has to do each thing.  While it is common for a quilter to perform the technique, it is also common for them not to perform the design.

As I said in an earlier post, I don't really understand not designing your own.  I'm not being critical; I just don't understand.

If I could wave a wand and change one thing in the quilting world, it would be that more quilters designed.  Not that I want to see your design.  I couldn't care less about that.  It's because I know you'd enjoy it.  You see?  I care.

But, if you want to share a creation in the comments, I'll look at it.  I might even be nice.  Take your chances.

Libby's Leaves

One day, when I happened to be visiting the family, I gave it to Aunt Libby.  Her eyes were misty, so I think she liked it.  But who can peer into the mystery that is woman.

It was a pretty special night because my quilting aunt, Aunt Vivien, was visiting from Montana.  We ate lots of fried fish that night, too.

Food & Family

It's the glue of a proper life.

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TheCurmudgeon